Respondent Thoughts Jim Hendler Director, Institute for Data Exploration and Applications Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler, @jahendler See BRDI slides at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/brdi/pga_181009 Summary at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/pgasite/documents/webpage/pga_182845.pdf CC(0)
Why me • Lots of history in this stuff • Early web development • Semantic Web & Linked Data • Open Government Data • Schema.org dataset/data catalog • Way too many committees and such • Which meant George knew where to find me CC(0)
Why me • Lots of history in this stuff • Early web development • Semantic Web & Linked Data • Open Government Data • Schema.org dataset/data catalog • Way too many committees and such • Which meant George knew where to find me • But more importantly: A known curmudgeon* * Thanks Julie M. CC(0)
Provocation • The data world is “inconsistent. Duplicative. Riddled with broken and displaying links” • The World Wide Web is inconsistent. Duplicative. Riddled with broken and displaying links • We live with it globally • We fix it locally • It’s a terrible solution, it’s just that everything else has not worked • Or been built on top of it (FB, Twitter, etc.) CC(0)
Provocation • Scientists spend 75/80% of their time dealing with data issues. • And we want to make it even harder?? • But don’t worry, we’ll incentivize by getting some funding agents to pay • Web made it easier to do document sharing • people used it for many reasons, but part is because it was easy to use and part is “kudos” • Entrepreneurs eventually provided the incentives for greater use CC(0)
Provocations I’ll skip… • The big challenges facing us today are INTERDISCIPLINARY so don’t build disciplinary solutions without interoperability • Human to Human communication is still a critical part of data sharing (get me to the right person is real sharing now) • If I don’t care about your data, why should I put effort into sharing mine? • Must support the “long tail” community • Biomedical/life science is well funded, Geo is sort of well funded, pretty much everyone else is struggling • There’s as many scientists in the tail as those in the big areas… • Support 3 rd party metadata repair (owl:sameAs, skos:exactmatch, skos:related…) CC(0)
An example to consider • Compare Schema.org to every other effort to get metadata out there • Used on BILLIONS of web sites • Authored by MILLIONS of webmasters • Guha’s talk (106k views) https://www.slideshare.net/rvguha/sem-tech2014c • Incentivize usage • Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity • Incrementality • Use URIs • Support Collaboration • Local and Global CC(0)
An example to consider • A horrible way to doing data sharing per se • But, got things going and keeps growing • Provides infrastructure on which to build • Grew out of testbeds, interoperability, and incentives • works • What could we do to bootstrap something like this? • (several slides removed here – see Carole Goble’s talk) CC(0)
My (provocative) suggestion • Build it and they will come • We’ve been talking about this for a long time • Standards done before use rarely succeed • We are starting to have enough “demonstration” projects • And some national-scale proposals • Infrastructure needs to be built • Grow it from interoperability of platforms • Keep interoperability central, supported and simple • Metadata is crucial!! • Keep metadata central, supported and simple • Let third parties help CC(0)
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